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Bookshop Miseries

Rainy Glasgow. While waiting for my son, I wander round Borders books on Buchanan Street.Am distressed and puzzled to find that I cannot see a single book I want to read, let alone buy. Why? It's like when you spend £100 at the Supermarket and arrive home with nothing you can actually eat.Could it be because this seems to be so obviously somebody else's choice, so different from my own, so thoroughly Metropolitan that I just don't get it?Or could it be because so many of them seem to be rehashes of the Last Big Thing in an effort to turn them into the Next Big Thing?Notice that the trend seems to be for covers to look like vintage railway posters. Covers actually seem much more interesting than contents.It must, surely, be me, faintly depressed, in rainy Glasgow.The single book that draws my attention is a new translation of stories by Tove Jansson called The Winter Book. I dramatised her Summer Book for BBC Radio 4, way back when. It was a favourite of mine, and the producer alike, a masterpiece in miniature. It took us years of trying to get it through the BBC's suspicious defences. (A Finnish writer of children's stories? Who could possibly be interested?) I almost buy The Winter Book, but the queue is so long that I think better of it. Don't have twenty minutes to spare. Will probably find myself looking for it on Amazon, while lamenting the demise of the book shop. There is a brilliant blogger called Grumpy Old Bookman. Realise that I am definitely becoming a grumpy old bookwoman.Realise too that I find second hand bookshops (or those with an enticing mixture of new and old) far more congenial than the big chains. Which is some admission for a living writer to make. There is one in Wigtown called Readinglasses which is so wonderful that I'd be happy to live there for a while, browsing happily, fortified by their excellent home made bread and local cheese and fresh coffee.

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